This study, the first in its scope on transgender religiosity, is based on in-depth biographical interviews with 13 transgender participants with a Jewish Orthodox background (currently and formerly Orthodox). The primary aim of the study has been to elucidate the entanglements of gender and religion in three periods of the participants’ lives: pre-transition, transition and post-transition. One of the main topics investigated have been the ways participants negotiated gendered religious practices in those three periods. A secondary aim of this study has been to co-theorize, in dialogue with the participants, different possible paths for religious change; that is, the ways in which the larger Orthodox community might respond to the presence of openly transgender members in its midst.

Concerning the findings, in the course of this study I have developed the themes of dislocations and reversal stories to explain how the participants negotiated the entanglements of gender and religion particularly in the transitional and post-transitional periods. The latter theme–reversal stories–has been of special relevance to explain how gendered religious practices, which were generally detrimental to the acceptance of the participants’ gender identities during the pre-transitional period, had the potential to become a powerful source for gender affirmation after transition. In this study I argue that this possibility and its related mode of agency are not contained within the binary resistance/subordination that feminist scholars have developed to account for the agency of women in traditionalist religions. In order to better conceptualize the notion of agency and explore the nature of the mutual entanglements of gender and religion, I deploy the body of theoretical work developed by Karen Barad known as agential realism. Lastly, I conclude by examining my initial commitments to social constructionism (in Peter Berger’s definition). In the final chapter, I describe how in the course of my study I have encountered three unexpected sites of resistance to social constructionism that have led me to reconsider my previous epistemological commitments and embrace posthumanism as a more satisfactory alternative.

In this theoretical essay we criticize theories of modernity and explore the possibility that the modern epoch is coming to a close while a new configuration is emerging: the global age. Building upon sociologist Martin Albrow's work The Global Age, we claim that Albrow's scholarship did a remarkable job at outlining the shift away from modernity, but that greater clarity is needed in laying out the main characteristics of the global age. With this essay we aim to fill that gap. Acknowledging that capitalism is the most important feature of our societies, we outline the contours of the global age through three interrelated concepts: interdependence, opacity and inertia, which in turn we exemplify with the global environmental crisis, the global economy and the Internet.

Through a case study of the Facebook page of a Jewish Orthodox environmental project based in Germany, this paper explores the ways in which religion and modernity might be made compatible and what role digital media plays in such interaction. On the basis of the empirical material gathered for this paper, the author presents a typology of religious-environmental processes of hybridization. The analysis draws from the concepts of multiple modernities, public religions and religious branding in order to discuss whetherthe combination of religion and modernity is enabled or compromised by the collapsing of boundaries between the public sphere and the marketplace in late modern societies. The findings suggest that Facebook and its affordances makepossible the particular intersections of religion and environmentalism, of public sphere and marketplace, that are characteristic of the case under study.

In this paper the author discusses different understandings of community and community inclusion as they are presented in a transcript of the YouTube video It Gets Better – Gay Orthodox Jews. This video, part of a much larger anti-bullying campaign, features the testimonies of five men. As their stories unfold in what could be described as a “coming out narrative”, the boundaries of the Orthodox and the LGBTQ communities are renegotiated, revealing a new space at their intersection. Furthermore, the analysis of the transcript suggests that embracing queerness is not tantamount to exclusion but rather the opposite. It is by affirming themselves both as Orthodox and queer that those men are able to reclaim their place in the community. Finally, the author argues that this case of community inclusion through self-fulfilment echoes and at the same time problematises theories of secularisation and individualisation in late modernity.

This thesis is a comparative study of Michel Foucault's History of Madness and Rabbi Nachman's teachings 64 and 5 from Liqqutei Moharan and Liqqutei Moharan Tinyana, respectively. The author compares how both authors conceive of madness and the limits of reason. The study is divided in three parts. The first and second parts are analytical, dealing with History of Madness and Nachman's teachings. At the beginning of the second part, the author also provides a general introduction to madness in Early Chasidism and a short biography of Nachman. Finally, in the third part, the author compares Foucault's and Nachman's thought in three sections: madness vindicated, reason exposed and power & the void. By reading Foucault through the lenses of Nachman and vice versa, the author attempts to provide new insights into the work of both.